


Juneou, 2556

by Gray_Days



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Agender Character, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-22
Updated: 2014-07-22
Packaged: 2018-02-09 21:50:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1999182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gray_Days/pseuds/Gray_Days
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a planet barely worth keeping track of, boiling with confused conflict in the third year after the war, and all that Locus cares about is that there are people on it willing to pay him to expedite their side of things. Which isn't to say that that part of the matter is without its annoyances, either.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Juneou, 2556

Locus has nearly finished clearing this area when a blip of red appears in his motion tracker, so quickly that he might almost think it was a glitch. Drawing back into cover behind a slashed conifer, he scans the direction it appeared in and sees a crevasse in the cliff face terminating the northwest edge of the forest, half-hidden by fallen grey boulders. The flash in his tracker was either a wild animal, unworthy of attention, or a living member of the undisciplined squad he just took care of, in which case it needs to die. Whatever it was, it's now motionless enough and shielded by enough rock that he can no longer pick it up.

He's willing to wager that the crevasse is large enough to contain at least one human body. There's no good angle of approach on it, and he can't see a target to get a clear shot, so he unloads a double set of three-round bursts into the roof of the hollow.

There's a garbled, half-muffled scream as the stone shrapnel finds a mark. Locus uses the moment to move up before aiming again and expending another six rounds. This time they're followed by a panicked utterance and the crash of undergrowth as the crevasse's occupant hurls itself out of its shelter in a badly-aimed roll. Locus is there to kick the submachine gun out of the human's hands as he rises and attempts to bring it to bear. The gun goes flying and hits the cliff, letting off a stuttering salvo of bullets that find their place in the roof of the very shelter the man just left. He takes a wild swing at Locus with his unbroken hand. Locus catches his wrist and with his other hand drives a combat knife through the forearm and into the cliff.

The man's scream is unrestrained this time.

It takes more than twenty seconds of gulping back pained cries and shivering before he seems to notice he isn't dead. Locus is ready. He waits until the man has started trying to keep silent to speak. "Is there anyone else here?"

He tries to glare at Locus with wide, white-rimmed eyes and says nothing, facial muscles twitching with the effort to stay quiet. There's a sharp, clean gash through his earlobe and diagonally across to the bottom of his jaw. Locus glances expressively at the knife, then unclips a canister of biofoam from his thigh and places it in the man's free hand, wrapping his purpling fingers around it and stepping away. His fingers drop the canister limply to the ground. Locus picks it up again and applies the biofoam himself. The man screams again, a ripping sound of agony even louder than when he'd been stabbed. He nearly falls to his knees, but the pulling of his arm against the blade keeps him upright. Barely.

Locus says again, "Is there anyone else here?"

The man breathes hard through his nose, each breath accompanied by small grunts of pain, his skin ashen. He wets his lips with his tongue, then gathers the saliva in his mouth and spits at Locus. The spittle falls short by a foot. "Suck my cock, bitch," he forces out.

Locus tilts his head just enough to express curiosity, not quite enough to express puzzlement. He finds it one of the more useful motions because it tends to evoke pants-shitting terror — not an idiom; he can count the times people have actually soiled themselves in response to it, and it's approaching double digits — but that doesn't diminish the genuine emotion behind it. He's curious. And the man in front of him, pinned straight to the solid rock by the knife in his arm, has just recognized that and is breathing more quickly, the anxious rising of his chest jarring his arm against the blade that, in combination with the pink-tinged foam spilling out around it, is preventing him from bleeding out through the separated veins before they can finish.

"I'm supposed to be insulted by the implication that I'm a woman."

It's not a question, but it comes off as one, and the guerrilla doesn't answer. The muscles in his throat work against his collar, muffling a whimper as he clutches ineffectively at his skewered arm.

Locus takes a step, putting himself near the arm so the man can't help but look at him unless he purposely turns his head away. "It was an attempt to offend me, and the first offensive thought that came to mind was femininity. Why?"

The man doesn't turn his head, just looks down as if he's trying to stare through Locus's waist at the ground behind him so he doesn't have to meet the facelessness of his helmet. Sweat slicks his cheeks, beading along the top of the cheekbones and graduating into a uniform sheen in the hollows. "I don't," he mumbles, breathing hard wet breaths presaging the urge to vomit, "I don't know."

"Do you think I'd be any less effective at killing you if I were a woman?"

"I don't know," he says again. His tone is more desperate this time. He's regretting everything that's occurring as a result of what he said. He's certainly regretting having said it, possibly regretting the sentiment stated as well as the decision to utter it.

Locus lets his head rotate to view the knife while the man slobbers pain onto the dirt. It was only by the immense force possible with the Locus power armor that it ever could have gone through bone and into rock without shattering. There's no way it will be able to be removed intact, not without a shift in basic physical laws. "You classify the world by obscure cues and assume I'm a man," he says thoughtfully. Perhaps the thoughtfulness is communicated. "Height. Vocal pitch. Possibly, if you had managed to target my groin, you could have gleaned something from my reaction. Yet those two things are the only cues you have in me...aren't they."

"Yes," the man gasps. He's crying and he doesn't know what Locus wants and his arm is pinned to a rock wall through the bone and he's saying whatever he thinks Locus wants him to say. What he doesn't realize is that Locus doubts by now that he has anything of value to impart. This is not an introspective man. This is a man on the verge of ruining his fatigues and who is about to die.

Locus wonders what it will take to push him over the edge and if it's worth it to do so. He thinks it most likely isn't.

Locus returns his gaze to the man's arm, not that he could tell. There's nothing he can tell for sure by Locus's visual presence. He could still be watching the man's sweating face from a new angle in his HUD. He could have a smaller throat compensated by a voice filter, breasts mashed tight against his ribs by the armor he's wearing, a vulva and vaginal aperture. He could have nothing.

This mewling mound of flesh is powered by unreliable perceptions and Locus is wasting time on it. He wrenches the knife from the stone and cuts the man's throat with the broken edge so forcefully that it rips through his windpipe and nicks his spine before exiting his neck.

He opens the direct line and says, "I've finished clearing this sector."

"Well, it took you long enough." Felix is panting. "What happened, the local morons get the jump on you?"

"No. One of them said something interesting."

"You're really something, you know that? All the crap you give me about playing with my food and then you go and do your stupid shitty scifi robot schtick, _oh, I don't understand humanity, what are emotions, is any of this even real?_ " There's the sound of a grunt through gritted teeth followed by the brief hissing of a biofoam canister close to the helmet mic. "You do this _all the time_."

"Are you hurt?" Locus asks disinterestedly, not bothering to acknowledge the conclusion Felix leapt to when the dead man could just as easily have said something relating to their mission. Felix probably thinks Locus doesn't care if he's hurt, or that he's privately enjoying Felix's pain. He does care, because if Felix's motions or reflexes are limited by injury it will be more difficult to do what they have to do and leave this region drowning in its own blood. Though he is — not quite enjoying Felix's pain, because that would require a sadism that for all his empathic deficits Locus does not possess and that Felix hasn't yet done _quite_ enough to merit, but he thinks with something akin to satisfaction or vindication that Felix could use a little pain to remind him that he is an idiot and he should know better than to do the things he does, both in general and in this specific case.

"Just clipped my shoulder." Another hiss, this time through Felix's teeth. "Ahh, _fuck_. I hate everyone here."

"I don't think you're in a position to criticize my efficiency or my ability to handle these targets."

"And I think you're an asshole. I'm moving on. Contact me again when you've got your part clear."

"Understood. Locus out."

Felix reopens the line only a second later. "But really, are you a robot? Because you make a pretty convincing—"

Locus disconnects and picks up his rifle, stopping to holster the dead guerrilla's gun and ammo packs on his back, then fades back into the forest en route to the next point on his list of objectives.


End file.
